Lines on the Death of Hilary Baker
Hilary Baker was mayor of Philadelphia in the epidemic of 1798, stayed at his post, and died of the fever on September 25. Someone printed thirty lines of elegiac verse for him within an ornamental border — probably Robert Aitken, on paper from the Brandywine mills — and the sheet was kept.
It is the fever at the scale of one death, and one of the few objects in the collection that mourns rather than argues.
(YELLOW FEVER). (BROADSIDE) Lines on the Death of Hilary Baker,
Unrecorded in all standard bibliographies: a genuine discovery. The thirty-line elegy begins: "The dire disease which through our city sheads / Its mortal poison o'er our guilty heads, / At length has levell'd in the silent dust, / The man whom foes and friends alike could trust..." Baker is the civic counterpart to Rush's physician: the man who stayed when others fled, who chose duty over safety, who died for it. The ornamental border matches one used by Robert Aitken on a Washington elegy in 1800.